Subj : Re: This echo To : Scott Adams From : Kay Shapero Date : Mon Sep 02 2002 01:35 am on Aug Aug 02 19:52, Scott Adams wrote to Kay Shapero: KS>> It's a novel _Green Mansions_ by W.H. Hudson, written in 1904. The KS>> protagonist goes to Venezuela (iirc), meets and falls in love with KS>> Rima the last survivor of a bird-like human race living in the KS>> jungle. SA> Ahhh..sounds like a book someone in the '30s did but i SA> can't recall the title. How did the author explain SA> the origin of this race? Rima had no idea - she was the last one and all she remembered was her mother. Evidence picked up by Abel (the protagonist) during the story suggests they were simply a small tribe who were overrun by another one, with Rima's then-pregnant mother the only one to escape. Lost races were common in pulp fiction of the time; seems you couldn't climb a plateau or wander into the jungle without finding one. :-> Or even fly way up into the air - I do not remember the name, alas, but I once came upon a short story about a pilot who flew his aeroplane higher than anybody before, and had to escape from a high-altitude civilization that lived among the clouds. KS>> fiction ones, so at one point we had a hard boiled detective KS>> (Cameron, Nicolai's "Bogey clone"), Doc Savage (and the Brain Trust), KS>> The Spirit, a handful of Borribles, a psychic, and (briefly) Lord KS>> Peter Wimsey involved in the same trilogy of adventures. KS>> (What I called the "What I did on my vacation" sequence. SA> hehe..reminds me of the call of cthulu rpg universe. I bought a fair number of CoC supplements, for the ideas, even though I was not using the Mythos. I still do - I bought the massive Antarctica expedition tome, which is full of useful stuff about shipping, weights and costs of expedition supplies and so forth, even though I've no plans of using the scenario itself. (Besides, I already have sent characters to Antarctica - I ran the novella "At The Mountains of Madness" almost straight, but letting them actually meet the star-headed old ones... and bring along some dynamite to make life interesting for the shoggoth. They also had some Very flares...) What I'd *really* like is the 1920's era encyclopedia I saw in a thrift shop years before I took up gaming, but of course I had no idea I was going to want it. KS>> First there was the trip out, complete with giant demon rat in the KS>> bilges, and Denny Colt (The Spirit) getting his exercise dodging a KS>> wouldbe girlfriend. SA> hehe..so sounds like you insert comedy alot... Oh yeah.. you should have seen the morning joggers exercising their way around the ship... though I'd say Denny thought of it more as trying to escape. You'd have loved the Winchester House scenario - heavily inspired by Elizabeth Wolcott's short "Westchester House" scenario in one of the CoC collections. (If you've ever been to the San Francisco Bay Area, check out the real Winchester house. The owner just kept building and adding on all her life, and the result is rather reminiscent of that line in Fiddler on the Roof "One long staircase just going up, another even longer coming down..." I digress.) Weird chanting in the cellars (some workmen found an old liquor cabinet...), weird spectres (actually an art thief) and all sorts of other stuff. There was one room they could only get into by climbing out of a window and inching across the ledge to the next window. Poor Denny was on that one too - he missed his balance roll, fell off, and managed to grab the window ledge on the way down. His less fortunate associate (Cameron, again) missed both rolls and landed in the rosebush. Crunch. Pause for entire room of players to visualize how Will Eisner would have drawn this, and have laughing fit. Continue... SA> Go from a kat to a werewolf...nice .. Well, it's simple - part of the party went to Lloyds, others went to someplace else equally public, and Doc and his friend went for a walk through the park in the fog. Who would *you* have visited with werewolves? :-> KS>> The trip back was uneventful - I figured the characters were tired KS>> enough. ) SA> ahh...shucks no train robbery ? Nary a one. Cameron was a friend of Lord Peter's brother in law, the policeman (whose name escapes me at the moment) and he gave some of the party a ride out and back. Frankly the way he drives they should have all landed in the ditch, but the dice were being friendly to the party that day. Made up for it when they got back home - IIRC the next thing I did was send the lot of them up the Amazon, to lots of insects, THRUSH, a brief encounter with a stranded alien test pilot, and a sort of miniature Shoggoth in an ancient temple... (Which btw is where they figured out how to make Blob-oid monsters unhappy by firing Very flares into them, and why I had no compunction about confronting them with a full sized Shoggoth, later, in Antarctica.) SA> 'heh...why always red...I like growing green and yellow eyes SA> myself :) or my favorite purple eyes... Call me a traditionalist. :-> --- Msged 6.0.1 * Origin: StormGate Aerie (1:102/524) .